Digital-footprint tracker Reputation.com announced this week that it acquired password manager MySocialCloud, a startup born at USC two years ago.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed, but it appears to be a significant achievement for MySocialCloud founders Scott and Stacey Ferreira.

Scott had taken a leave from USC and his sister Stacey left New York University to work on the service. They attracted $1 million in funding from Virgin tycoon Richard Branson, venture capitalist Jerry Murdock and Photobucket co-founder Alex Welch. But MySocialCloud had struggled to attract users or produce revenue. It's advertising posters can still be seen hanging on bikes near USC's campus.

Michael Fertik, Reputation’s chief executive, heard about the company earlier this year. Shortly after, he visited the team in Los Angeles and bought the company.

“It’s a good team, and they shared a vision of a user-centric Internet where you can control your data,” Fertik said.

The Ferreira siblings won't join Reputation.com, he said. Only Chief Technology Officer Shiv Praksh, 27, will move to the Redwood City-based company. Neither Dhiraj Laddha nor Kinesh Satiyaof – the other two MySocialCloud employees – are working with Reputation.com.

[Updated, 9:40 a.m. PDT July 25: A Reputation.com spokeswoman now says Laddha and Satiyaof will be working for the company.]

The company declined to make any of them available for comment.

Through Reputation.com, consumers and business can track their online mentions and attempt to remove items such as phone number listings or undesired reviews.

Reputation.com's latest project is to create a “consumer data vault” where individuals could store information about themselves, including their buying habits. Individuals who want coupons and giveaways could trade their data for those offers. The company says it’s a better system than the current one in which information is often traded between companies without an individual’s knowledge.

Fertik said he hopes to use the MySocialCloud's technology to improve mobile apps and to add some form of a log-in credential management tool by the end of the year.

“If you believe in giving users a digital vault to control their information, you want to be able to give people a set of tools to log in and log out as seamlessly as possible with a set of trusted tools,” Fertik said.

This is Reputation.com’s third publicly announced acquisition. Another expanded the service into the United Kingdom. Last month, it bought PaperKarma, a service for blocking junk snail mail.